A process takes place over a period of time. During the process various events and activities occur and various parameters vary in value. There is a need to monitor a process in order to analyze its performance or of any parameters thereof, whether the process is an industrial one for the handling, treatment or flow of material or other process, such as the tracking of the weather or of commodities or other financial instruments and the like.
An event is something that happens at a specific point in time, e.g., an alarm becoming active, an operator message being confirmed, a parameter download, recordation of a lab measurement, and the like. An activity is something that happens over a period of time, e.g., a movement of material, a batch, a phase inside a batch, an alarm being in an active state, and the like. An activity has a time span, interval or period. In contrast, an event occurs at a specific point in time.
In the operational environment of a process, large quantities of historical data can be generated by different data sources. Capturing, storing and making this data available to applications for viewing, analysis and reporting is a challenge. Prior solutions for event and activity data are partial at best. For event and activity data, this problem has mostly been addressed on a system (data source) by system basis, each system supporting a well defined, limited set of event and activity types.
Capturing event and activity data is a challenge because the data that needs to be captured for each event and/or activity depends on the event and activity type. For each event and activity type, a different set of (attribute) values may have to be recorded. Another challenge is the fact that the data can come from any number of data sources. Storing the data is a challenge because each data source tends to come with its own solution for historizing the data, which makes the administration task of archiving, recovering and distributing the data very difficult.
Making the data available is a challenge because of the multitude of event and activity types that need to be handled and the need to be able to handle new event and activity types by simple configuration, without requiring a new release of the product. Traditionally, different visualization tools have been used for limited, well defined sets of events. The challenge is to combine all this data into a single stream that can be displayed in a single view.
Thus, there is a need for a flexible and efficient method and system for processing event and activity data of any type and any number of systems.